Drawing things on margins of notebook paper. "Don't let it touch the ground!" Punting little paper footballs into a goal. Spinning razor blades of instant death. Ah, the little joys of childhood, rolled up into one fun puzzleplatform game from Sandeep Saha, Paper Venture. In a carefree doodle art style, you use a simple block attached to your cursor to guide your lemming-like protagonist around a dangerous or simply tricky area to the goal.

Controls are as simple as it gets: when you click the left mouse button, your little robot guy starts walking. He will walk straight forward until he encounters a wall, in which case he will turn around and walk straight backwards. If he encounters a gap, he will drop through it. If he encounters the edge of the screen, he will walk right off of it. And if he encounters a spinning blade of death, he will suffer from sudden existence failure. Luckily, you, oh player, are there with your trusty block, permanently attached to your cursor. You can manipulate the robot character with it by lifting him, catching him, and nudging him towards the goal and away from dangers. As with any platform mouse game, use of an actual mouse rather than a trackpad is recommended, especially in the later levels.

Paper Venture has great level design and a satisfying level of challenge. Its only drawbacks are peripheral. The biggest design flaw was the location of the sponsor logo in the lower left corner. There are several levels where clicking to start the level seems most natural right on the sponsor logo... which of course causes the sponsor website to load in another window. It is possible with careful positioning to click without hitting the logo, but this is a needless hassle. The game also could have been improved with a level select screen to allow the player to replay a favorite level. As it is, your choice is either to replay level 30 over and over, or to wipe your save and start from the beginning.

These two flaws are definitely something that should be improved in any sequel, but as it is, the game is still a delightful little puzzle platforming diversion with a whimsical mood.

7 Comments

Agreed. A lot of the time you can bypass most of the level easily with some quick platform movement. A good fix for this might be if the platform could only hold the robot for a certain amount of time (per carry or per level), or if there were checkpoints that you had o have your robot hit in a few places on the level before going for the exit.

The concept is cool, but the platform ability renders much of the level design moot.

I agree that the game was rather easy. I was only mildly challenged by the last five levels - everything up to that point was a breeze, and even those I only had try a few times before learning their tricks and beating them.

A suggestion for the developers might be to make it not possible to pick up your robot before he starts moving. Because of this there were a number of times I was able to just lift him up out of the path of potential danger before clicking, and then all I had to do was move the mouse to keep pace with him while he sailed safely above the hazards.

Still, it was fun and I played it through to completion. It's a good concept, just needs a little tweaking and refining to make a really excellent game.

I really enjoyed the music in this game! It was an interesting idea, but had several flaws. I agree with the stupid placement of the logo. Also, my hand is a little unsteady at the moment because I'm sick, so I wish you could click again and make him stop walking. On some levels, checkpoints would be helpful. Maybe this is just because my computer is old and can't handle this game, but sometimes it would freeze up for a few seconds and then start back up. Which of course would make me fail because my hand would not be with the character anymore because he was still moving while it was freezed and he would fall off the platform. 3/5

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